G Lists and ad hoc groups

John Tropea has a couple of posts that echo one of my last posts about ad hoc groups, and I think he’s right when he says OPML is the vehicle to achieve this.

He says:

Now what I say is why do we have to go to MyBlogLog to see all this when the Recent Reader widget could be an annotated Grazr widget, like Twazr.

I’ll go one better I think. Why do you even need to go to your own site? Why not a dynamic feed in your reader? Or better yet, both.

And,

Further to this a Grazing List is an ever changing list of feeds, and this is what the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget is, a perpetual changing list of people/blogs based on these people/blogs visiting your blog site

Yup, and why not a dynamic feed based upon conversations you are in as well? Every RSS item is open and two-way, to whatever extent you wish. Comments are dead.

Lastly, he is frustrated about these services not working together and accepting the de facto standard for reading lists, OPML,

can’t I just plug in this OPML into a service, just like SYO.

I hear ya. IF we can make some progess on Identity and the use of XRI for discoverable services about oneself, I don’t think you or I should even have to upload our OPML. Just keep one file up to date and all sorts of services can use it.

Voila!, ad hoc groups based upon your Glists (Grazing Lists, Reading Lists, Listening Lists, Viewing Lists)

A new type of newspaper site

I have officially accepted a position of Web Development Director with The Hour newspapers in Norwalk, Connecticut.

The company is locally owned by a trust, a much different scenario than the Tribune owned The Advocate, where I previously held the postion of Senior Web Producer.

The current sites are in great need, and the company is hoping I can bring them up to modern standards.

Hopefully the scenario will offer me the opportunity to make the sites a model for other newspapers of all sizes.

I expect to use many of the ideas you folks have given me to formulate a modern strategy that includes consideration of VRM, Attention, Gestures and syndication.

OPML will be an integral tool building these newspaper sites and services, as will the concept of River of News.

I also plan to use open APIs from other services like Twitter and Flickr and Grazr, to integrate these services into other communities.

Similarly, I’ll try my best to expose whatever services we can offer through the use of APIs.

There are great opportunities out there for media companies that are willing to do things right, and I’m hoping this will be a chance to do just that.

The Google ReWriter and SSE

James Corbett asks where the integrated read/write web tool is, and claims Google Reader will morph into it.

He also claims comments are dead this year. I don’t like them either but I think that’s aggressive.

James, if you and Tom Morris want to eliminate comments, I think we could do it with SSE, like I showed at OPML camp.

We are blogging on three distinct platforms (Wordpress, Typepad, OPML community) so it would be a great start if we could get it to work between the three of us. Then we can widgetize it with Grazr ; ).

Incremental adoption is the key to Semantic Web adoption

Danny Ayers has some wisdom about not reinventing the wheel for the semantic web.

Apparantly there seems to be a disconnect between the MySQL community (or CEO at least) and the Semantic Web community.

It’s hard to disagree with Danny most of the time, but I think the RDF web communty can take one thing away from this whole debate. (and I think they do)

The Semantic Web community needs to make this stuff more easily accessible to the average mortal web developer.

There was a time when there was bit of talk about using OPML and RSS as a springboard to getting kids to adopt some more sophisticated RDF stuff.

We do want to make this stuff relatively easy to experiment with, and then developers will see it’s power and want to delve deeper.

When someone makes something like a GrazrScript layer on top of a SPARQL query (hint hint), I think we’ll see some more mainstream adoption.

But ultimately, Danny and others are right. The foundations are in place.

But, as Tim Berners Lee pointed out recently, we need to have incremental adoption, and that’s all I’m driving at.

widgets = services = paradigm shift

Steve Rubel with a nice post that exemplifies what I mean in my earlier post about GrazrScript.

The web is no longer about the home page, or even a web page. It’s about services between individuals and companies, and the widget boom is just an indication of that coming paradigm.

And RSS and OPML are the laguage of these coming services.

GrazrScript in public beta

Grazr script, which allows you to make widgets with the Grazr app, and potentially much more, is now public.

In case you don’t know, Grazr is sort of an OPML. . . well grazer. It’s a very important concept in this future present world of a web that is built on top of RSS.

If I was forced to choose whether I could only use RSS or HTML, I’d choose RSS.

Luckily, I don’t have to. I just think it’s more important in the paradigm shift that is taking place right now. The move toward services and relationships, that is, over distribution and consumption.

I was allowed to test it out in the private beta, and found it to be pretty damn cool. Maybe when I have I minute I’ll post an example of my experiments. I promised not to talk about it before it went public, and man it was tough.

One thing I know. It will be an important piece in the next web application I build.

Expect to see a lot more action in this area. I’m sure Tom Morris has a few things brewing already.

Here is the spec..

Media is dead

Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang.
And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such.
I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that.
He’s an “Attention” guy.
You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one.
Is Google a media company?
No.
Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers. (sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either)
Google is doing more than that.
They are an Attention clearing house.
It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. (del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sources etc.)
They are enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the Cat.
There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation.
Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open.
Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated.
I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too.
It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end.
Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now.
So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies.
And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot.

Open Job Directory - free OPML data

OPML heads and job-seekers may wish to look at the open job directory’s free data:

http://freecruiter.com

The OPML is at http://freecruiter.com/directory/

OPML, RSS, REST and XML-RPC API’s are available.

Perfect for readers that subscribe to OPML like BlogBridge or for OPML browsers like Grazr.

Right now source include Monster, Hotjobs, Craigslist and Edgeio, but more importantly businesses, like Edelman and O’Reilly.

The businesses that publish their own job feeds are where the interesting disintermediation aspects lie.

The Golden Fleece

I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.

If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.

That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.

If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.

It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.

The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.

The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.

These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.

Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.

In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.

That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.

I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.

I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.

No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.

The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.

Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.

Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.

The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.

OPML Camp a huge success

So, Im back from RSS Alley and OPML Camp today.

I did not blog from the conference simply because the conversations were so rich and thought provoking that I didn’t want to only give them partial attention.

Attention itself was in fact a big topic and there is some big news coming our way on that topic. Other topics included namespaces, the spec, RDF and tags. Oh and Second Life seemed to permeate the breaks. I even talked a little on SSE, and I think we might see some progess on SSE used with OPML soon.

Special thanks must go to Adam Green, who did a great job organizing and Berkman for hosting, and Halley Suitt and the Top Ten Sources folks for hosting the party.

And if Dave Winer is listening, we all thanked you for RSS and OPML in general. Great work.

The whole weekend was truly inspirational.

But speaking of conversations and attention, this one is nearly over for me.
Perhaps a couple transitional posts and I’ll be moving on.

A couple things are for sure. OPML and Reading Lists (Glists if you ask me, Beeds if you ask James Corbett) have a huge future. Attention and gestures have a huge future. Grazr has a huge future and Second Life-like environments have a huge future. I’d like to be in the middle of it all.

Or I could just hang out on the podcast.com platform(search for podcast in second life) and listen to streaming music.

Either way.